Shakespeare's Revision of KING LEAR

by Steven Urkowitz

Overview

Of the three texts of King Lear--the Quarto version printed in 1608, the Folio edition of 1623, and the modern composite of these two early texts--it has been assumed that both the Quarto and Folio versions arc distortions of an unblemished original" now lost and that only the modern text accurately approaches Shakespeare's lost original manuscript. Steven Urkowitz argues to the contrary that the Quarto and Folio are simply different stages of Shakespear's writing--an early draft and a final revision--and that they reveal much about his process of composition.

Originally published in 1980.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609768
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Essays in Literature , #634
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear

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By Steven Urkowitz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06432-1

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CHAPTER 1

Current Opinions on the Texts of King Lear

Bast. If the matter were good my Lord, I durst swear it were his: but in respect of that, I would faine thinke it were not.

Glou. It is his.

Bast. It is his hand, my Lord: but I hope his heart is not in the Contents.

There are three texts of King Lear. The first, called the First Quarto, appeared in 1608. The second, printed in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works, appeared in 1623. The third, the modern version, is a composite made up from the two early texts; it achieved its basic shape in successive editions published during the eighteenth century.

Editors of the modern text base their work on the premise that Shakespeare wrote only a single original draft of King Lear, now unfortunately lost, and that the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio both distort the missing original manuscript. Modern editors assume that their own texts more accurately approach the hypothetical lost original than does either of the two early versions. All editions used in schools follow the modern text; all literary analysis is based on the modern text; and practically all theatrical productions are founded on the modern text.

But I argue that in many specific details — of dialogue, stage movement, spectacle, characterization and plot — either of the two early texts is superior to the modern version; that the Folio text represents a careful and dramatically sensitive revision of the Quarto; and that the revision could have been made by no one other than Shakespeare himself.

Four hundred lines of the modern text of King Lear, slightly more than 10 percent of the play, appear in only one or the other of the two early versions of the play. The Quarto contains about three hundred lines not in the Folio, and the Folio contains approximately one hundred lines not found in the Quarto. In addition, at least a thousand isolated words are changed in the two early texts, the punctuation is throughout radically different in style, and about half of the verse lines in the Folio are either printed as prose or differently divided in the Quarto.

One theory after another has been offered to account for the differences between the two early texts. Several of the most important have been proposed intermittently for over two hundred years, each time prompting the same series of objections, opposing theories, and modifications. A reliable determination of the sources of the variants in the early texts of Lear has been an elusive goal. Viewing the results of the search for reasonable, or even possible, causes of the variants, the foremost authority in the field concludes: "The truth is that critics have been speculating without proper regard to the probabilities of the case. ... It is to be feared that a consideration of the various theories so far advanced can only lead to the conclusion that it remains as true today as it was twenty-five years ago that King Lear still offers a problem for investigation."

The modern text of King Lear follows what is commonly thought to be an acceptable editorial policy. Given its basic form by Theobald in 1733, the modern text was at first based on the unproven assumption that a combination or conflation of lines from both early texts would approximate a hypothetical "original." Some contemporary editors and textual critics, including Alice Walker and G. Blakemore Evans, still maintain this position. Other editors, who perhaps question or even reject the idea of a single authorial original existing prior to the Quarto and the Folio, nevertheless reproduce the text that has become conventionally acceptable. Charles Knight, a practical and successful nineteenth-century editor and publisher, was one of the first to articulate his reasons for adopting the composite text after rejecting its theoretical justification:

There are passages, indeed, which the [modern] editors have restored from the quartos; and we admit the importance of preserving those passages, upon the principle that not a line which appears to have been written by Shakespeare ought to be lost. ... Our copy is literally that of the folio, except that where a passage occurs in the quartos which is not in the folio, we introduce such a passage, printing it, however, in brackets.

With or without brackets, modern editions uniformly present a text of King Lear containing all the lines that may be practicably included from the Quarto and the Folio, in an attempt to preserve all of Shakespeare's writing.

The modern composite text of Lear is the product of methods first developed for solving classical and Biblical textual problems. Many early writings come down to us in different surviving versions, each ultimately derived from a single lost original; when all variants in alternative texts of a work are introduced by copyists or, in the case of printed books, by compositors, then the recovery of the author's original intentions is frequently possible. Unauthorized changes in individual words, word order, punctuation, lineation, scansion, etc., may be recognized and the original readings recovered in a relatively straightforward manner. These satisfying restorations account for the appeal of bibliographic studies, and upon such work stands the justifiably strong reputation of textual scholarship. But these methods do not work if they are applied to alternative texts created by a revising author.

After more than two hundred years of editorial practices that have led to a text of King Lear generally accepted by readers, performers, and scholars, recent scholarship has begun to question even the most basic tenets of conventional editing when they are applied to Shakespearean texts. Arguments which have assumed that Biblical or classical scholarship offered simple analogies to Elizabethan bibliographical problems now appear to contain many contradictions in both theory and fact. Fredson Bowers, after examining the complexities in the current state of Shakespearean textual studies, comments on the basic presumptions behind many established editorial practices: "I submit that the evidence on which we have all grounded certain articles of faith is in reality rather uncertain." Many independent lines of inquiry seem to confirm that Bowers is correct in his basic scepticism. Practically all the assertions that have been made, about the genesis of major variants amounting to many lines each and minor changes in single words or phrases, may have to be reexamined and reevaluated.

Inadvertently, the very success of bibliographic scholarship has limited discussion of the variants of King Lear to a small group of highly specialized textual scholars. Until quite recently, this narrow focus seems to have prevented or discouraged other scholars from analyzing literary or dramatic merits of variants in King Lear. However, during a fundamental revision of textual theories there is a critical need for cooperation among the various specialists. Phillip Gaskell, author of an important new introduction to bibliography, warns, "Literary judgement alone, without the discipline of textual bibliography, will result in the production of misleading and inaccurate texts as surely as will the mechanical application of bibliographic rules. Textual bibliography is based on the union of literary judgement with bibliographical expertise." For about the first two hundred years, textual study of King Lear was overwhelmingly literary in its biases. For the past twenty or thirty years, we have seen predominantly bibliographic analysis. The present study attempts to deal with some of the major problems in the text of King Lear in what is hoped to be a useful fusion of these different techniques.

A history of critical opinion on the text of King Lear could be a volume in itself. Now, however, although critics maintain considerable differences in particular details, they generally agree that the Quarto text is drawn in some way from Shakespeare's foul papers and the Folio text is derived in some way from a playhouse promptbook used by Shakespeare's company. Critics disagree on why there are differences between the Quarto and Folio, and on which text to follow in specific instances.

The First (Quarto

Until the 1950s, most critics subscribed to the theory that the Quarto text was printed from a shorthand report made in the theater by an unauthorized "pirate." First proposed by Lewis Theobald in 1733, this theory was improved and embellished over the years, reaching what is perhaps its most vivid formulation in 1880, when Alexander Schmidt described the following as the probable method by which a disreputable printer acquired his copy:

It could not have been difficult, where neither pains nor cost were spared, to procure by copyists in the Theatre a passable, nay, even a complete and correct printer's copy. If it proved too much for one shorthand writer, two or three could accomplish it, by relieving each other; and if it could not be finished at the first performance, it could certainly be done at the second or third.

The appeal of this scheme, and of others like it, is that it gives support to the image of Shakespeare as a classical author whose originally flawless writings were soiled and distorted by intervening agents. The shorthand-report theory for the Quarto text of King Lear allows critics to ascribe many of its variant readings to what they propose were the "errors" made by the actors in performance, by the acting company during the preparation of the author's text for the stage, by a scribe copying out the actors' parts or the promptbook, by the shorthand reporter when he was in the theater or when he was transcribing his notes, and by the compositor in the printing house.

But two separate developments in textual and theatrical criticism led to the abandonment of both the shorthand-report theory and related theories which assumed that the Quarto was at some point in its history derived from a performing version of the play. First, after decades of debate, it has been conclusively proven and universally accepted that no technique of stenography known in England in 1608 was capable of transcribing anything as difficult as a play. Second, textual critics have realized that the exigencies of producing a large and constantly changing repertory of plays would make revisions of the type found between the Quarto and Folio of King Lear highly impractical once either version had been brought to the stage. W. W. Greg, who had been one of the strongest proponents of the reporter theory, later recognized that "had there been a report of a stage performance it would almost certainly have given us a garbled version of F rather than anything resembling Q." He added, "In every respect the quarto text is unsuited to representation." G. I. Duthie argued that actors rather than reporters assembled the Quarto text out of their faulty memories of the parts. His theory was so cumbersome and improbable he withdrew it and confirmed that "Qi, then, does not look like an actors' reconstruction, and my 1949 theory had better be abandoned." Since the Quarto could not have been derived from a performing script or from some recollection of a performance, critics have turned again to examine the possibilities that the Quarto represents a version of King Lear made prior to the playhouse promptbook.

Only two theories are now seriously considered as possible explanations for the derivation of the Quarto. The most frequently quoted, though not widely accepted, is Alice Walker's proposal that the Quarto is printed from a surreptitiously made copy of Shakespeare's foul papers. The many flaws in the Quarto, such as misspellings, mislineation of verse, the printing of verse as prose, etc., previously thought of as reporters' errors, are seen by Walker as the results of a hurried and inaccurate transcription made by two boy-actors. They worked, she explains, in the playhouse, one dictating and the other writing. To account for many of the variants in single words and phrases, Walker proposes that the boys unconsciously substituted those "vulgar" or unpoetic variants which appear in the Quarto in the place of the apt and "genuinely Shakespearean" expressions found in the Folio. In order to explain particularly corrupt passages, Walker also argues that the boys often allowed their memories to trick them during the process of transcription; that instead of following their copy when they transcribed scenes in which they had acted, they relied on their faulty recollection of performances rather than on the text before them; that they interpolated words or lines from other scenes or from other passages of dialogue, sometimes getting a syllable or a sound wrong, and sometimes losing or adding an entire line or speech; that, once sold to a printer, their frequently illegible rough copy led the compositor in the printing house to make more errors, and the compositor himself was responsible for still more accidental omissions, inversions, and substitutions.

Despite its many errors and "oddities," Walker argues, "the quarto text is much closer to the foul papers than is widely supposed" (p. 69). (This was written in 1954, when the Quarto was still considered by many editors and textual critics to be a report of a performance.) Walker concludes that the Quarto "is very good text and we shall lose much of the linguistic and dramatic subtlety of Lear if the most is not made of the quarto readings" (p. 67).

The unstated premise of Walker's argument is that Shakespeare himself composed nothing but the foul-paper manuscript he turned over to the players. All subsequent changes were made by other hands, Walker believes. Michael J. Warren has recently questioned the validity of this premise, the basis not only of Walker's hypothesis but also of all modern composite texts. He points out, first, that there is no real evidence to indicate the existence of a lost "original" antecedent to the Quarto and Folio. And, second, he argues that there is no reason to believe that other hands, not Shakespeare's, created all the alterations from the imagined "original."

The second major theory on the derivation of the Quarto text also holds that it was derived from Shakespeare's foul papers, but the irregularities in the Quarto, according to this theory, reflect the confusions in the foul-paper manuscript itself.

R.W.B. McKerrow proposes that the general class of popular drama printed in quartos, including King Lear, contains much more textual confusion than is found in other printed material of the period, not because plays were frequently "pirated," but because "whereas in the case of most book-copy of the time the operation of the licencing laws brought it about that the compositors had a careful fair-copy to work from, in that of the plays they were far more likely to be furnished with an author's rough draft much corrected and never put in order for the press." The fair copy of a play was submitted to the Master of the Revels for censorship. (His endorsement was required "at the latter end of the said booke they doe play.") McKerrow argues that since the fair copy served the double functions of license and promptbook, as a valuable asset the acting company would not release it to a printer if another copy of the play was also available. If the author's working draft was in the possession of the acting company, then that draft rather than the fair-copy promptbook would be given to the printer when the company approved publication. Greg, for one, believes this to be the case at least for the Second Quarto of Hamlet, though he rejects this theory for the Quarto of Lear because of the magnitude of that text's irregularities (First Folio, pp. 316, 378).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear by Steven Urkowitz. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
• CHAPTER I Current Opinions on the Texts of King Lear, pg. 3
• CHAPTER II Textual Variants in Dramatic Contexts, pg. 16
• CHAPTER III Textual Variants and Players’ Entrances and Exits, pg. 35
• CHAPTER IV Interrupted Exits and the Textual Variants in Act Three, Scene One, pg. 56
• CHAPTER V The Role of Albany in the Quarto and Folio, pg. 80
• CHAPTER VI Contemporary Bibliographical Theories and Editorial Practices and the Case for Authorial Revision, pg. 129
• ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS, pg. 151
• NOTES, pg. 153
• INDEX, pg. 167